I Don't Know

Jan 15, 2011

I had the pleasure of watching Scott Chacon
keynote at CodeMash this week. He spoke about how
Github “manages” its development team and product
development. I enjoyed the talk, and encourage you to download his
slides if you weren’t at the
conference.

Scott is a very energetic speaker and talks really fast, so he ended his
keynote with a lot of time to spare (something I wish I would do more
often). So he took questions from the audience.

A lot of the questions were about trying to fit Github’s process into
companies of very different profiles. So, for example, “Would this work
in blah blah blah environment that is totally different from Github?”
Scott’s answer was excellent in these several cases:

“I don’t know.”

He didn’t blow the questions off. He then discussed possibilities. But
it was incredibly refreshing to hear “I don’t know” from a speaker being
questioned in front of an audience of almost 1000 people.

I wrote in The Passionate
Programmer about the difficulty and
importance of learning to say “no”. I think “I don’t know” is scarier
and harder and maybe more important.

When someone regularly says “I don’t know”, you trust them more when
they say they DO know.